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A mayor who wades into the public gallery at city council, allegedly in support of his foe-swamped brother, triggering a near-melee.

A mayor who apparently directs someone from his staff, wearing a security lanyard around his neck, to record the extraordinary events, turning his cellphone video on citizens. Big Brothers are watching you.

A mayor who grins maniacally and chortles and guffaws and blows sarcastic kisses and does stretching exercises on the sidelines while council tries to debate a motion of unprecedented seriousness.

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A mayor who has lost all moral — if not legal — authority to lead: Unwanted at the Santa Claus Parade, unwanted at the Toronto Argonauts playoff game, unwanted in the vicinity of school children visiting city hall (a program now suspended) and unwanted by a majority of council at the helm of the city in anything other than statutory name.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford speaks from the council chamber as councillors look to pass motions to limit his powers on Monday November 18, 2013. (Chris Young / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

A mayor who, his appallingly belligerent brother suggested by way of a defeated motion, should stand for an exceptional interim chief magistrate election.

A mayor who warrants a two-part report — “The Full Ford” — on CNN from one helluva gobsmacked correspondent.

And that was before Toronto got to watch pre-taped interviews with on Anderson Cooper’s AC360 program and Sun-TV — the latter stepping up to provide the gruesome twosome Fords a replacement bully pulpit after a local radio station pulled the plug.

For CNN, and in front of kids at a public housing community room in Etobicoke, Ford unleashed a mouthful of profanity. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have sworn in front of these people.”

But what have we, the people of Toronto, done to deserve this insanity?

Well, we — enough of you — elected him.

In Gonzo Ford World, that seems to mean he can continue making a fool of himself and a fool of the metropolis, until his term runs out.

A mayor who admits smoking crack, admits to binge drinking, admits to raucous late-night partying in his office, admits to maybe boozing and driving, makes jokes about cunnilingus in front of the cameras, consorts with thugs and felons, yet still believes himself competent and entitled and, golly, beloved.

It’s hard to say which between the Ford brothers is the more delusional and repugnant. But only one of them is mayor, a fact Doug routinely ignores. Mayor Faux now.

They are twin blobs of disgrace and disrepute, a folie a deux that has taken the entire city hostage to their pathology.

That much was indisputably on display Monday in council chambers, during a free-for-all debate on a historic motion introduced by Councillor John Filion to strip away most of the mayor’s powers, which were ultimately transferred to Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly.

Not the end, Doug warned, merely the beginning of an OT shootout.

When the Fords weren’t beating up on colleagues, turning chambers into a UFC ring, they were whaling on city staff, snide and contemptuous and overbearing.

This is politics as practised by the Fords: a spectacle sport perpetrated by goons.

Even Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, Ford acolyte, is at the end of his tether, though more conciliatory. He tried and failed in a bid to defer Filion’s motion until a medical certification could be secured — bring in a doctor’s note, essentially — that Ford is fit to retain office.

“It is deplorable what you’ve done, and inexcusable what you’ve put the city through,” intoned Mammoliti, who boycotted the vote. “And I say this because I spent all last week reaching out to you, trying to get you to do what you should have done. I still think that you’re ill and that you’re addicted to some kind of substance.”

Yet Mammoliti posed what is surely, by now, a rhetorical question: “Is there an emergency?”

From the peanut gallery: YES!

And: IT’S THE CRACK!

And: SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!

Except it isn’t the crack any more, not by this point in the six-month saga of Ford’s unraveling. The drugs and the booze, those are primarily the mayor’s personal issues and most people would wish Ford well in dealing with them. It’s his conduct at city hall, in public, on the press conference stump, and most of all his unrelenting defiance amidst scandal that has brought about, finally, a day of reckoning.

His character and bizarre behavior, his violation of all ethical standards, is the gist of the thing. And only his enablers remain loyal.

“I’m rising in support of the motion. I do, however, want to say that I don’t believe we’re building a firewall around the mayor. I see it as more like a picket fence. I don’t believe ... that we are really constraining his powers. Those are his statutory powers.

“There are two ways I think a mayor can lose his statutory powers. One is for the province to take them away from him, and the second way is for a mayor to lose them all on his own, and that’s what I think he’s done.

“The mayor’s lost his ability to lead on this council and many of us have known this (for) many, many months. The Argonauts don’t even want him to go to a football game and they don’t want him to wear the jersey. I submit we don’t have to take away his statutory powers. He’s already done that by losing the hearts and the minds of thousands of people across this city.

“You, sir, have lost the ability to lead this city.”

Councillors were fretful about the legality of what they were contemplating and whether they might be held personally responsible in any lawsuit the mayor brings forward, which he’s certainly indicated he intends to do — at the taxpayers’ expense, the same taxpayer he has so endlessly championed. In fact, the motion was reworded to make it more specific shortly before the council session began — just 26 minutes beforehand, Doug Ford furiously objected. “This is not democracy,” he fulminated.

His respect — or lack thereof — for democracy had just moments earlier been demonstrated by a whiny demand that chambers be cleared of spectators he didn’t like. “Can I ask the special interest groups and union members to leave the chamber, because they’re the same group that shows up all the time.”

Not, in other words, card-carrying members of the failed state that is Ford Nation.

The mayor, meanwhile, yammered on about his direct and populist approach to the job: an average of 552 emails do his office every day, 489 phone calls, 111 that he takes personally. And how would he cope with this demand with a budget shrunk by 60 per cent, his staff reallocated?

Filion tried, mostly without effect, to keep the mayor on debate track.

“The mayor has unfortunately chosen the path of denial. Last week, he rejected an urgent and unprecedented call by council that he stop the car and turn the wheel over to somebody else, at least for a period of time. Now it’s time to take away the keys.

“New allegations pile up faster than the old ones can be dealt with, and each day brings the same question: What next?

“If many Torontonians were originally fascinated by the drama, they’re now fed up with it. They want it to end.”

Step by step, line by line, city council did that on the multiple-part motion, with Ford removing himself from the voting on advice of the city’s integrity commissioner.

But not before the mayor made his final mind-blowing pitch.

“Folks, this is nothing more than a coup d’etat. And if you don’t what a coup d’état is, it means that you’re overruling a democracy. What’s happening here today is not a democratic process, it’s a dictatorship process.

“If you vote in favor of any of these motions, you are absolutely telling everybody that voted in the last municipal election that their vote does not count. I didn’t think it would get to this point, but it has. I’ve apologized enough, I’ve admitted my mistakes ... there’s only so many times you can apologize, but you guys won’t give up.”

Ford reminded that, on two occasions during this administration when fellow councillors have found themselves in trouble for drinking and driving, he’d stood by their side. “It was Rob Ford. It was Rob Ford.”

And then he completely lost his nut, evoking Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein, of all people.

“This, folks, reminds me of when I was watching, with my brother, when Saddam attacked Kuwait. When President Bush said, I warn you, I warn you, do not.

“Well folks, if you think American style politics is nasty, you guys have just attacked Kuwait.

“Mark my words, friends, this is going to be outright war in the next election.

“What goes around comes around.”

Earlier in this most stupendous day, while mid-rant, Doug Ford had said in a shushing aside to his brother: “Enough, Rob.”

At 5:33 p.m., Nov. 18, 2013, it became official for Toronto: Enough, Rob.

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